This is a project I've been playing around with for a while now during my commute to work.It's called Hovercraft and it's a game where you fly a weird little ship collecting gems and avoiding obstacles on your path to the landing zone.you control the ship by firing any of your craft's jet engines, it's fairly hard to control so most levels can be completed in less than a minute.

So this project is pretty much feature complete, it now has 56 levels, a leader board ,15 (I think) achievements and the game play is not too buggy.

I am pushing it into beta-testing to tune the levels, if anyone is interested in trying it out please let me know and I'll add you to the Google+ group that is the group of beta-testers. I would appreciate any comments you might have.

If anyone does give it a go I would very much like feed back on the difficulty. I've deliberately made it difficult (to to point where I expect a beginner to have to try several times to complete the first level), but I obviously don't want it to be too difficult.

I've been playing this game on my phone for little over a week now, and I can tell you that I've had a ton of fun. I think today only I already played over an hour. It's a really good game for when you have a small moment. The graphics aren't what you would call fancy, but I like them nontheless. It's a bloody hard game though. And the level difficulty differs every time. Some of them are rock hard but I also finish some of them in one go. That's maybe something you can think about but other than that, good work!

I've been playing this game on my phone for little over a week now, and I can tell you that I've had a ton of fun. ...but other than that, good work!

This made my day! The fact that you liked it and took the time to tell me so is something I appreciate very much. It motivates me to finish off the game by ironing out the last bugs (sorry about them) and adding a config options that allow the player to tweak the controls a bit.

I know the levels aren't exactly incremental in difficulty, I'm writing this game on my commute to/from work and level design is something that I haven't given the priority it needs (I've gone for finishing the game instead). I know that's an area I have to work on and I'll try to do better.

Yes. Their weight is proportional to their size, so the red one is more sluggish. A few chapters later you get a smaller yellow one, with is more agile. In all honesty, those to chapters are there to stretch out the game as they're both contain only copies of previous levels, that you now have to navigate with a different hover craft.

I've gotten some comments about how the game is very difficult and how the controls are a bit small on small screen devices so I've released an update to the Google Play where there's a Settings screen where the player can tune this a bit.

I would love to hear if changing the Controls setting makes the game more playable.

I've tried the game with the new settings and they make it a lot nicer. Not only the bigger buttons are very nice, but the control difficulty slider is a nice addon as well. I still can't manage level 7 of chapter 4 though, but I think that's just my lack of skill.

Here are some things you might want to improve to make it even better:

The contrast between light-blue sky and white letters is weak. There are way to solve this:

- add a dark outline to each letter (this solution is the best, but I assume needs most work)- make the sky a little bit darker- make the letters black or maybe some gold/yellow shade

As for the gameplay, there are two frustrating moments:

1. when you fall on the "roof". You have to restart the level, but there is no button on the screen for it, I have to use the back button on the device to get it to show. Looks like a nitpick, but making the game dynamic is what made Flappy Bird a hit.

2. falling all the way down. You have to wait until it gets there. Of course, having a restart button on the screen would fix that. But maybe, you could add a huge horizontal platform at the bottom that bounces. So if you fall off, you could bouce and try to climb back up.

Also, could you please enable the immersive mode on KitKat. My son keeps hitting the back and home button on the device all the time. If you're not sure how it's done, and you're using libGDX here's the code:

The contrast between light-blue sky and white letters is weak. There are way to solve this:- add a dark outline to each letter (this solution is the best, but I assume needs most work)- make the sky a little bit darker- make the letters black or maybe some gold/yellow shade

Do you mean the text in the actual levels that says things like "Land here" and "Collect all gems...", or the ones in the menues?in either case I'll look in to increasing the contrast.

1. when you fall on the "roof". You have to restart the level, but there is no button on the screen for it, I have to use the back button on the device to get it to show. Looks like a nitpick, but making the game dynamic is what made Flappy Bird a hit.

2. falling all the way down. You have to wait until it gets there. Of course, having a restart button on the screen would fix that. But maybe, you could add a huge horizontal platform at the bottom that bounces. So if you fall off, you could bouce and try to climb back up.

Both very valid points I think. I am not asking you to design my UI, but where would you put such a reset button?Maybe move the "compass" to the top and have a reset button where the "compass" is now?

Also, could you please enable the immersive mode on KitKat. My son keeps hitting the back and home button on the device all the time. If you're not sure how it's done, and you're using libGDX here's the code:http://bigosaur.com/blog/32-handle-immersive-kitkat

It's not built using libGDX (in hind-sight I probably should have used that), but in any case; I'll enable immersive mode.

Thank you so much for commenting and providing such detailed and valuable feedback.

So I am working away implementing the comments given to me when a user emails me this screenshot from him playing the game.He somehow managed to land the hovercraft with no landing gear or no engines attached.

As for the gameplay, there are two frustrating moments:1. when you fall on the "roof". You have to restart the level, but there is no button on the screen for it, I have to use the back button on the device to get it to show. Looks like a nitpick, but making the game dynamic is what made Flappy Bird a hit.2. falling all the way down. You have to wait until it gets there. Of course, having a restart button on the screen would fix that. But maybe, you could add a huge horizontal platform at the bottom that bounces. So if you fall off, you could bouce and try to climb back up.Also, could you please enable the immersive mode on KitKat. My son keeps hitting the back and home button on the device all the time. If you're not sure how it's done, and you're using libGDX here's the code:

I've implemented these now. If you're on a KitKat (or higher) device the game will go into Immersive Mode. Doing that forced me to fix your other two points as well as there's no way to restart the game when the back-button is hidden.

I added two buttons at the top of the screen (took some re-shuffling of the HUD), one for quick-restart and one brining up the game's standard pause-menu. The problem is that the buttons aren't that intuitive so at the beginning of the level a message is show to tell you what they do. That message fades away as soon as the game starts;

1. When you restart the level the sound keeps playing. To reproduce: press B button and hit Restart while still holding B. The level will restart. Release B - sound keeps playing.

2. When I'm holding the phone/tablet upside down (I have to because it's charging and I'm in bed and the cable is too short ) it would be nice if the screen turned as well. Doing this is a simple, just add this line in AndroidManifest.xml:

Ah, also too, a splash screen i think it could add some more seriousness/profesionalism, if thats what you want.

I've always thought that a splash-screen should be very minimalistic, it should spend zero time loading things for itself and essentially only be the required wait until resource are loaded. But since my game have a fairly limited number of users I also thought I should pay attention to their opinions, so I added stuff both to the splash-screen (as per your suggestion) and also the menu screens. And I must say I think it looks a lot more polished. Maybe the menus look a bit cluttered now but I still like it better than what I had before.

I've just pushed out version 1.7 (or the scanevaro update as I like to call it ), if you have time; update your version and let me know what you think.

Fair point. I thought that it was obvious that you had to complete chapter one to see chapter two, as that is how the levels work (you have to finish level one to unlock level two), but for the stars it's a little bit more obscure, and I have gotten the same comment from other users. I don't know a good way, short of telling you at the end of the level "if you had been 1.2 seconds faster, you would have gotten two stars", to indicate this though. If I figure something out I'll add it, unless you've got a suggestion?